 Great, I think we'll begin. Thank you so much to everyone for coming tonight. We are very excited to offer this program to the community and we are doing it, of course, with such wonderful contributions from some community members tonight. I'm so happy to introduce Emily Channel Justice. She is the director of the Temetri Contemporary Ukraine Program at the Ukrainian Research Institute, Harvard University. She is a sociocultural anthropologist who has been doing research in Ukraine since 2012. She has published academic articles in several journals, including History and Anthropology, Revolutionary Russia, and Signs, Journal of Women and Culture in Society. She received her PhD from the Graduate Center City University of New York in September 2016. We're also joined tonight by Chris Martin of the Davis Center for Russia and Eurasian Studies, Harvard University. She shares her knowledge and research on Russia and Eurasia to a variety of consistencies, including undergraduate students, local K-14 teachers and students, and the broader community. Prior to her work at the Davis Center, Chris worked at IRAX in Washington DC, managing cultural and academic exchange programs in Russia and Eurasia. She holds an M Master's Degree in International Education Policy from Harvard's Graduate School of Education and a BA in History from Carnegie Mellon University. And I wanna thank both of our speakers so much for being here with us tonight and sharing their knowledge and research in helping us understand the war in Ukraine. I also wanna thank our partner libraries for helping us get the word out about tonight's program. I wanna thank the Belmont Public Library, the Wellesley Free Library, and the Winchester Public Library. Special thanks goes tonight to the Arlington Libraries Fertip Foundation for supporting this program through a grant to the Robbins Library for our civics engagement series. And with that, I know we are all real eager to hear from our audience before we begin, excuse me, from our speakers. Before we begin, I do wanna let people know that tonight's presentation is gonna last for about 30 to 40 minutes. And during that time, please feel free to enter any questions into the Q&A and chat. After the presentation, I'm gonna be come back to moderate everyone's questions and we'll really have a chance to get to those questions. And with that, I want to turn it over to both of you. And again, thank you so much for joining us tonight. Thank you, Anna. Thank you, I'm so glad to be here. I'm gonna share my screen. So I'm gonna get started and then I'll hand it over to Emily. We're very grateful to have the opportunity to provide some perspective and background on the ongoing war in Ukraine, perspectives from Kiev and Moscow, what the impacts have and are likely to be and where the conflict goes from here. And you might notice my background picture is actually a picture of Kiev and I haven't had the pleasure of going there myself, but I feel like the images of Ukraine that I've been introduced to over the last six weeks have been so devastating. I wanted you all to see this beautiful space. So just bear that in mind as you're watching our presentation tonight. So let's start with what we know, right? So we know that on February 24th, Vladimir Putin, who has been president of Russia basically since the year 2000, authorized an invasion of the sovereign state of Ukraine. And despite Putin's clear intentions, he had amassed over 150,000 troops on the Ukrainian border prior to the invasion. The invasion took the world by surprise, mostly because people couldn't believe that he actually went through with it. So Putin's initial rationale for why he was sending troops into Ukraine was to save the people of Eastern Ukraine. And by that I mean the area that's marked in red on this map, labeled Donetsk and Luhansk. This is a region known as the Donbass. And why did these people need to be saved? Well, since 2014, when Russia was annexing Crimea, the other area on the map here that is labeled with the color red, this region of Eastern Ukraine also launched into a military conflict. And over the past eight years, there's been an ongoing simmering military conflict as these regions are home to Russian-backed separatists who have been fighting to break away from Ukraine and become fully independent. Now, why eight years into this conflict, Putin had to send Russian troops in to liberate these people is an excellent question that doesn't really have an answer. But that was at least part of Putin's argument. There was some hope initially that Putin might stop there, right? If the argument is that you're sending troops in to liberate Donetsk and Luhansk, then there's no reason to send troops into Kyiv, which is in the center of the country. But of course, that is not what we've seen. Over the past six weeks, what we have seen is a full military onslaught in Ukraine by the Russian armed forces. The map that is on, look, if you're looking at it on the left, that's labeled March 13th, shows that Russia launched a three-pronged military attack on Ukraine, attacking from the East through Luhansk and Donetsk, from the South through Crimea in the Black Sea, and from the North through Belarus, which is an independent country, but one of Russia's strongest allies. But the Russian advance, as we know, from the headlines has been largely disastrous, despite the widespread destruction that it has left in its wake. Putin seemed to have the assumption that he could steamroll into Ukraine, take the capital, overthrow Ukraine's democratically elected president, Volodymyr Zelensky, and install a pro-Kremlin puppet in Kiev, but that clearly hasn't happened. And this was largely because of the response of the Ukrainian people and the Ukrainian military, which has been courageous, united, and rooted in dignity. It seems that Putin himself has been surprised by the Ukrainian response. He seemed to be laboring under the assumption that the Russian troops would be greeted as liberators, especially in Eastern Ukraine, which is home to many ethnic Russians and has traditionally had a more pro-Russian point of view. But within the last week to 10 days, we've seen that Russian troops have withdrawn from Kiev, and you can see that on the second map, which is labeled Ukrainians we take areas. They have withdrawn from Kiev in its surrounding neighborhoods, but what they have left behind has been unimaginable destruction and atrocities. Russia is currently regrouping their forces, focusing now on Eastern and Southern Ukraine, so they can fight on a more unified singular front. But they continue to launch attacks on innocent communities. And just several days ago, at least 50 civilians were killed when cluster bombs struck a train station in Kramatorsk in Eastern Ukraine. The people were assembled there to flee the area given the expectation of imminent attacks. So it's not clear how many lives have been lost. At this point, estimates vary. The Ukrainian government says that over between six and 10,000 civilians have perished, and maybe as many as 1,500 Ukrainian soldiers. At this point, NATO estimates that between 7,000 and 15,000 Russian soldiers have died as part of the military advance, and this number, 15,000, is equal to the number of Soviet soldiers who died in Afghanistan during the 10-year Soviet-Afghan War. In just six weeks, it's likely that over 20,000 lives have been lost, and we really don't know the true scale of what lies within the destruction of the cities of Ukraine. In addition to lives lost, of course, over 4 million Ukrainians have fled Ukraine to other European countries. You can see on this map, a large number are going to Poland, but also headed to Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, and Moldova, and other countries in the Baltics, for example, and over 7 million have been displaced internally within Ukraine. So they've had to leave Eastern Ukraine in droves for the West, where there has been less conflict. In addition to deaths and displacement, you also just have the absolute destruction of infrastructure. Infrastructure in Ukraine has been demolished. Whole communities have been devastated. Homes, businesses, hospitals are now unrecognizable rubble. The key of school of economics has estimated that the cost of the damage to Ukrainian infrastructure is over $63 billion, and economists believe that Ukraine's economy will be cut in half this year, a 46.5% recession, and it may take 15 years for the economy to return to its pre-war levels. So this is some of the what of what is happening, and we're gonna turn to the why of why this is happening. And I mentioned already that Putin's argument initially was that he was going into Eastern Ukraine to save the people of the East. One of the other strong arguments, or what Putin believes is a strong argument, that Putin has made relies on his own interpretation of history. Putin has created this narrative that says that Ukraine is not and never has been a sovereign state. Ukraine and Russia do have close ethnic and linguistic ties. Obviously they were part of the same country for 70 years during the Soviet period, but they both became independent nations on the same day in December of 1991. But Putin labors under this delusion that Ukraine is not a separate state and he issued a very long statement that included this quote, which said, I would like to emphasize that Ukraine is not just a neighboring country for us. It is an inalienable part of our own history, culture, and spiritual space. These are our comrades, not only colleagues, friends, and people who once served together, but also relatives, people bound by blood. It should be noted that Ukraine actually never had stable traditions of real statehood. And so to refute those claims, I'm gonna turn it over to my colleague, Emily Channel Justice, to discuss some of Ukraine's sovereign history, its recent history with Russia and some of the other reasons why Putin may have chosen to invade Ukraine. Thank you, Chris. And thanks so much everybody for being here and thanks to Robin's Library for the invitation. I'm very happy that there's so much interest in this conversation. And I'm smiling just a tiny bit here because I was recently in a conversation with a colleague of mine who reminded us that a few years ago when Vladimir Putin won Person of the Year for Time, I don't know if you win that or he's just named that. In his interview for that, he actually called Ukraine an independent state. He recognized Ukraine sovereignty. So this shift to say that Ukraine is not an independent or sovereign state and never has been, is actually a new rhetorical shift. And that's something that makes it, this whole thing very interesting because we've been talking about kind of why now what has changed. And we're not really sure, but we are seeing the shift in Putin's narratives. So I'm gonna take us back many thousands of years to start with. And then I'm gonna rush through Ukraine's very long history. But as you can see on the map on the left-hand side of your screen, Russia itself is enormous. And Ukraine is really just a smaller, it's not even the largest former Soviet Republic, but it's smaller size there, doesn't really diminish its importance. So what you can see on the right, Vladimir Putin and his claims for Ukraine references the historical moment of the Kievan Rus, which is this former empire that started in Ukraine's current day capital of Kiev. It was founded in 879. And it is one of the most important parts of Ukraine's history, because it was in this imperial period of the Kievan Rus that Ukraine starts to have a code of law. It converts to Christianity as an empire. And we start to see the real development of what Ukrainians end up seeing in the future as their first version of the Ukrainian state of a sovereign idea of Ukraine. So what you can see on the map on your right, the colorful parts of territory there, those are all, that's how large the Kievan Rus was at its peak. And then I've superimposed the borders of the Russian state in blue and then contemporary Ukraine in red. So you get a kind of idea of just how much of contemporary Ukrainian territory was part of the Kievan Rus. Now, as you might know, Vladimir Putin is claiming that the Kievan Rus is the origin point for the Russian empire. Ukrainians dispute this, that's not part of the narrative of Ukrainian history. And so we're really talking about this mobilization of a specific narrative of history to serve Putin's end. And this Kievan Rus history is really important to Ukraine. You can see from my dates that the Kievan Rus fell in 1240. So it was really quite a long period of time of establishing Ukrainian history in a certain way that was then, it's often pointed to you as part of Ukraine's historical narrative. Next slide, please. So throughout Ukraine's long relationship with Russia, I'll gloss here over quite a lot of history. Ukraine was part of not only the Russian empire after the Kievan Rus fell, this is kind of a few hundred years later the Russian empire begins to expand and then Ukraine becomes part of the Russian empire. And then later on, Ukraine becomes part of the Soviet Union. Ukraine becomes part of the Soviet Union or the Eastern part of Ukraine, excuse me, that you can kind of see in the lighter colors of blue here. Those parts become part of the Soviet Union in 1922 and the Western parts of Ukraine going all the way over to the very far part of the map on the left. Those don't become part of the Soviet Union until 1945. And in between here in 1918 and 1922, there is a historical moment of Ukrainian sovereignty. The Ukrainian People's Republic was established. This is a state-like initiative that had support across a lot of the territory of contemporary Ukraine, but was certainly deemed as threatening to the Soviet Union. And so it was crushed by the Bolsheviks as the Bolshevik power expanded from Eastern Ukraine through to Western Ukraine over the 1920s. And the other really essential part of this story is that Ukraine suffered from a union-wide famine that affected much of the Soviet Union in 1932 and 1933. This is known as the Holodomor and this is a famine that in addition to influencing hunger or causing hunger in several Soviet republics, it was also designed to destroy the Ukrainian intellectual class. So it was a way to functionally destroy the Ukrainian nationalist movement that existed in the 1930s because Joseph Stalin, who was in power at that time, deemed that too threatening to Soviet unity. And we know that the Holodomor was covered up by the Soviet authorities to the point that even historians who are experts on this topic don't actually agree on the number of victims to this day. We estimate that it was around 4 million people, but high estimates actually suggest that it could have been up to 10 million people. And many of those people, the famine was concentrated in the Eastern territories of Ukraine. And when all of those people died or moved further west to try to find food, Russians moved in, built up infrastructure, built up industry and really changed the face of those regions. And that's one of the important explanations for why there are so many Russian speakers and ethnic Russians in Eastern Ukraine. So I've taken you through a lot of years of history. Ukraine becomes independent from the Soviet Union in 1991, as Chris mentioned, the same day that the Russian Federation becomes independent from the Soviet Union. And you can see on this map that Ukrainians overwhelmingly supported independence in 1991. We are an absolute majority in every single region. There's even a majority of people who support Ukrainian independence in the Crimean Peninsula all the way at the bottom of the map. 54 is not that high of a percentage, but it is a majority. And so this is significant because we get a lot of narratives about the divisions between East and West in Ukraine. But it's important to keep in mind that when independence was on the table, certainly everybody supported the independence movement. And Ukraine has been working really hard to establish a strong democracy because most people in Ukraine would like to be part of the European Union. They want to be part of international organizations. So that's a conscious effort that a lot of people are making. Next slide, please. And one of the main moments of this claim toward a kind of European future for Ukraine is in 2013 and 2014, which was the Euromaidan protests. And this is a photo that actually happened during my fieldwork while I was in Ukraine doing research for my dissertation. So this is a photo that I took of those protests in December of 2013. So these protests were a way to push back against Ukraine continuing to be part of Russia or continuing to orient itself toward Russia instead of the European Union. But it also became a way to establish better democratic values, trying to move away from corruption, from oligarchs being in power. Now, some of these things have worked well. Some of them haven't worked well. I would say the Ukrainian democracy, it is a democracy, it's a very imperfect democracy as are most democracies. But this protest movement in 2013, it ends in 2014, that's a really crucial moment where definitively Ukraine gets oriented toward democracy. Next slide, please. So one of the other important narratives, we know Ukraine's moving toward Europe, but NATO is really, as far as international institutions go, it's a much stronger narrative in this particular conflict because Vladimir Putin, one of his other justifications has been this suggestion that Russia was being threatened by NATO growth into countries like Ukraine and the Republic of Georgia. So he claimed that he wanted Ukrainian presidents, Alenkiy, to declare that Ukraine would be a neutral country and not join NATO. One of the kind of important parts of the story, Ukraine's interest in joining NATO comes largely after 2014 and the reason for that is because Ukraine previously housed the Soviet Union's nuclear arsenal. So when the Soviet Union collapsed, Ukraine held most of its nuclear weapons. The Ukrainian government at that time agreed with the Russian Federation, the United States and other actors that Ukraine would give up its nuclear arsenal in exchange for a guarantee of protection of its sovereignty if its sovereignty was violated. This is what's known as the Budapest Memorandum. So NATO agrees also at that time that it won't expand and incorporate other former Soviet republics. So Vladimir Putin, he's not completely lying when he says that NATO promised not to expand. However, Russia did agree not to violate Ukraine's sovereignty and that's not what happened in 2014. So if you look at the next slide, we can see that there's a significant moment in 2014 where if you look at the measures, these are some of my colleagues who have been doing public opinion surveys in Ukraine for a long time who shared this data. In 2014, it was actually not that popular among Ukrainians the idea of joining NATO. And we've seen a dramatic increase after, first of all, the first invasion in 2014, we see a dramatic increase. And then we see another dramatic increase in 2019 when President Zelensky gets elected and there are renewed peace talks or renewed efforts to have peace talks. And it becomes clear that the Russian threat has kind of been renewed. And so this data, what's especially interesting about this data is that not only do we see this dramatic increase, but it's actually represents all of Ukraine. So we were looking in 2021, we were looking at 56% of people from every single region, including those regions in the Far East that are supposedly pro-Russian. They also had 56% of the population who wanted to join NATO. And so this claim of Vladimir Putin that Ukraine should declare some kind of neutrality. First of all, Ukraine was neutral in 2014 when they took over Crimea and Donbass. The Russian aggression is itself what is making Ukrainians more interested in joining NATO. And the other thing that is also really important to keep in mind is that Ukraine was frankly, at least a decade away from joining NATO if it would ever qualify for NATO membership. And so this argument that Russia had to preemptively attack Ukraine to protect itself from NATO is certainly an exaggeration of Ukraine's potential NATO future. And not super likely, even if Ukrainians were more inclined to support NATO membership. So I just have one more slide to give you a nice good look at the map of Ukraine. Russia has been claiming, in addition to this NATO argument that it needs to what Putin is calling denazify and demilitarize Ukraine. And these are terms that are largely built on a false narrative of the far right's power in Ukraine. I'm happy to talk about that more, but I would say that since President Zelensky's election there has been a really significant decrease in any actual power that far right groups held and far right figures held in Ukraine. Zelensky himself is Jewish. He comes from a family that survived the Holocaust and fought in World War II for the Red Army, for the Soviet Army. So he's really somebody who represents, I think, actually what Vladimir Putin is really afraid of, which is a true democracy in Ukraine. And so I think this, no matter what Putin says, this is really more about Russia being afraid of having a strong democracy on its border. So I think we're turning now to international response and I'll turn it back over to Chris, but I'm happy to field your questions. Thank you, Emily. So what has the international response been so far? Obviously, it was fairly swift and it was really coordinated and fairly comprehensive. You can see here on this map that all of the countries that are in blue have condemned the attack. Those in red have a pro-Russian stance and then there are a fair number of yellow countries. You'll notice the biggest yellow country here that has remained neutral is China, which is not only one of Russia's most strategic allies, but it's also an authoritarian nation who sees little to gain in joining the West in their condemnation. So what has the response been? The response has been largely made up of three parts. The first is condemnation. So just saying, we don't agree with what you've done. The second has been the shipments of humanitarian and military aid to Ukraine. And the final and sort of the most headline-grabbing one has been the economic sanctions that have been levied against the Russian economy by a number of countries and the EU. So individuals have been sanctioned. Those people who are close to Putin have had their bank accounts frozen. The Russian central bank has been sanctioned. It's the largest central bank that has ever received sanctions. Russia is the 11th largest economy. And what that means is that Russia's financial reserves, much of which were held outside of Russia, have been frozen, and particularly there, the ones held in the West. And these reserves were intended to help shield Russia from the impacts of global economic shocks and sanctions and to help them manage domestic inflation. And then, of course, they were also, some banks were cut off from the swift messaging system. In addition to these focused sanctions, we've seen nearly 500 businesses have withdrawn from Russia. This will have a large impact on the availability of consumer goods, the Russian workforce, who can no longer work at these companies. And most importantly, almost as the lifestyle of citizens. Although we've heard about headlines about Russians not being able to shop at Zara or Ikea or to get a Frappuccino anymore, the fact is that the bigger impacts are gonna come from the fact that major shipping companies, such as Maersk, are no longer allowing their tankers to come to Russia. And that'll have a drastic impact on imports. And now there are new sanctions that are not allowing airplane parts to be imported to Russia, which means Russia won't be able to maintain their fleet of planes. So the Western response by different companies has varied. Some have severed all ties. Some have just suspended operations, but regardless, it'll be difficult. These companies won't be able to restart up their work in Russia overnight. And so in a way, there are some people who believe this may have a larger impact on people's opinions than some of the financial sanctions. But what more can be done by the West? Ukraine needs more arms. They need more armored vehicles. They need more planes. The recent horrors that were exposed by the Russian retreat from Kiev did result in additional sanctions on the Russian economy. But the reality is that sanctions take time to have an impact. In fact, the economy which took an immediate hit after the initial sanctions were launched has largely rebounded at this point. You can see from this graph, the orange marker shows how the ruble was devalued, especially after the invasion and the sanctions that hit. But by April 8th, the value of the ruble was basically back up to where it was a year ago. Now, that said, there's been huge inflation in Russia. So even though the value of a ruble might be the same as it was a year ago when they're trading it against the dollar, Russian people can't buy the same goods that they were able to before with that same ruble. But the reality is that sanctions are likely not going to have the impact that many might think they would have. Sanctions are meant to be persuasive, not just punitive. They're meant to make people rise up against the government or cut ties with the government. And that's clearly not really been the case. The most nuclear option of sanctions against Russia would be to reduce or eliminate the purchase of Russian oil and gas, which would have a huge impact on the Russian economy. Russia is the largest natural gas producer in the world and many countries in Europe, especially in Germany, rely on Russian natural gas to keep their homes and to power their factories. So the fact that Germany and other European countries in particular are continuing to purchase oil and gas from Russia means that they are in effect helping to prop up the Russian economy and fund the war. Now, the reality is the US pretty quickly came out and said that we would stop buying hydrocarbons from Russia, but we rely on them much less than Europe does, partly because, of course, natural gas, unlike oil, has to flow through a pipe. And so there are pipeline infrastructures that exist in Europe that bring the natural gas to Germany and other countries that don't exist coming to the US. So at the onset of the war, though, Germany did announce that they would not open the brand new Nord Stream 2 pipeline, which was something like an $11 billion pipeline that was meant to bring gas from Russia to Germany without passing through Ukraine, which was a huge blow. But the reality is that Russia is likely to make as much as $320 billion selling hydrocarbons this year. But things haven't changed in Russia just because of Western actions. Putin has become more and more autocratic over his rule and has recently really clamped down on society, particularly around the freedoms of speech, expression, and the press. So the Kremlin did control most of the media before the war, especially TV, which was primarily government controlled, but now all vestiges of independent media have been forced to shut down. Even Novaya Gazeta, a Russian newspaper whose editor, who's pictured here covered in red paint, he had just won the Nobel Peace Prize. The editor here pictured he was attacked on a train and called a traitor and covered in red paint for having a slightly more liberal world view. Most Western social media platforms, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube have been blocked in Russia and Facebook was even labeled an extremist organization, which makes it on par with Islamic extremist groups. They also passed a law saying that you can't call what's happening in Ukraine a war. You have to call it a special military operation. And if you were found to be calling it a war on some, either through social media or through more likely through the press, you can spend 15 years in jail and receive a hefty fine. So the government controls the vast majority of the media space and the social media space. And it's full of Kremlin propaganda, which is brainwashing a good number of the Russian people. And many truly believe that the war is just a limited military operation and that any violence in Ukraine is justified because Ukrainian Nazis are persecuting Russian speaking Ukrainians and Eastern Ukraine. So the narrative that is being constantly replayed over Russian media is having an impact on what people believe. Now, there are those who are less inclined to believe the propaganda who may have access to Western media through the use of a VPN. But even some of those people are coming around to Putin's way of thinking because there is also this subtle argument that the bad things that are happening in Russia, the impacts on the economy, the fact that McDonald's has withdrawn is really because of the West and that maybe the West really is out to get Russia and to keep Russia weak. And the last thing I wanted to say about the propaganda space is that it's easy for us to think in the West that Zelensky, who has been so masterful at using social media, appearing on the Grammys recently making very, very heartfelt speeches in English, in Ukrainian, in Russian, speeches to Congress, to the UN. It's easy to believe that he and Ukraine are winning the information war and in the West he certainly is. But in the East, in Asia and in the Middle East, it looks like a different story. In fact, the hashtag I stand with Putin trended on Twitter in early March, largely as retweets from paid accounts that are located in India, Iran and South Africa. And it has since been banned on Twitter. Political protests in Russia is completely disallowed. In the first week of the war, around 15,000 people were arrested for protesting. Sometimes as simply as standing outside with a blank piece of paper, they would get arrested on the street for that. But at this point that has really dwindled as people have either left Russia or are too afraid to come out and speak against the government. There does seem to be more of a silent resolve, not really a patriotic response. When Russia annexed Crimea in 2014, there was a strong patriotic response in Russia. Russians were proud to have Crimea back. They were proud that their leader had taken this decisive action. And this is not seemingly the case right now in Russia. That said, you're also not seeing people come out on the street protesting against the violence against the people who are supposed to be their brothers. Recently, the UN kicked Russia off the Human Rights Council and Russia retaliated by banning Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch from Russia, which means there are also sort of no longer any cops on the beat to monitor Russia's human rights abuses. Now, those who do oppose the war in Russia and have the means to do so have been leaving Russia in droves. It's estimated that around 500,000 Russians, largely the upper middle class, educated intellectuals, have fled Russia as they see no future for themselves there. And there are also, of course, young men who are worried about being conscripted into the army. You can see in this image, this is the prevalence of search terms being searched for on Russian Google, Yandex, in the week following Russia's invasion of Ukraine. So what happens next? Of course, no one can say for sure. We know that Russia is regrouping, focusing instead on bringing their reserves to fight in Eastern Ukraine and looking for victory on potentially smaller terms. There are some people who believe that Putin needs to have a victory by May 9th. May 9th is Victory Day in Russia. I mentioned already, and Emily mentioned as well, the fact that Putin has a very warped sense of history, but there's also a very big cult of World War II in Russia. And so there's an idea that if they can bring home some kind of victory by May 9th, and that would help tie the war in Ukraine into this larger narrative around the glorious fight in the Second World War. So I will say that it does seem like the Russians may have maybe learned from some of their early military mistakes in Ukraine and they have instated a new field general to organize the battle locally, as opposed to from Moscow, but morale amongst the soldiers remains low because the Russian soldiers, they don't really know what they're fighting for, unlike the Ukrainians who are fighting for their families, who are fighting for their country, who are fighting for the place that they call home. The Russians don't have that, they don't know what they're fighting for. So it's clear that some of the Western sanctions, the Western response kicked up a little bit after the atrocities were revealed in Bukha and Kramatorsk, but still no Western nation is willing to send troops into Ukraine to help fight. They're not willing to go to war with Russia themselves. And in terms of the diplomatic negotiations, they are largely really going nowhere. Russia's initial terms for the negotiations stipulated that Ukraine must agree to remain neutral, meaning they could never join NATO, that they needed to demilitarize and needed to acknowledge Crimea was officially part of Russia and recognize the independence of Luhansk and Donetsk. Ukraine, of course, just wants their country back, right? They want an immediate ceasefire and the withdrawal of Russian troops and future security assurances from Russia that they won't do this again. But there's not a lot of faith in these negotiations and you can imagine why, why would anybody trust Russia at this negotiating table? Russia has indicated that they're willing to stop the hostilities during the negotiation process, but that's never been true. They've continued to bomb Ukraine even when the negotiators are around the negotiating table. Given Ukraine's very effective military response, Russia has had to concede a little bit, but they remain focused on neutrality, i.e. Ukraine not joining NATO and on the recognition of Crimea and the Donbass as either being Russian or at least independent of Ukraine. And so although it's very unclear what will happen next, we can imagine that this, I imagine maybe Emily can share her view too, that this is probably a long way from over. So I think we'll stop there and turn it over to your questions. Great, thank you so much. I invite the audience to enter questions either into the chat or to the Q&A and I learned a lot and have so many questions. So I'm gonna start with a few, thank you again. I am very curious, Chris, when you're talking about there needs to be some kind of, something needs to happen by May 9th. From the beginning of this conflict, I've been very curious, what does I guess victory look like to Russia? Yeah, that's a really great question. I think that a lot of the sort of Russia watchers very early in the crisis said that there was no plan B, that the goal was simply to remove Zelensky, install a puppet leader in Kiev who would be pro Russian and there wasn't really a backfall position to that. So I think at this point, victory looks like taking some territory in the East and in the South, potentially ensuring that Russia can get to Crimea in the areas that were formerly Southern and Eastern Ukraine, not having to cross the bridge that they built to connect Russia to Crimea several years ago, to make, to have access to some of the resources that are the natural resources in that area. I think that that is the most likely victory at this point if they can arrange it. I don't know what you think, Emily, what if you have a perspective on that? Well, I think the bottom line is that they, there is kind of a deadline by which to be able to claim a victory. So I think what's almost more important is not whether Russia has achieved any of its actual objectives, but how it's going to spin this claim for this territory, which has something that's been discussed before, not just the land bridge to Crimea, but potentially all the way to Moldova because of the brick-way Transnistria Republic there. Although that, I think would be really risky given the risk Ukrainian response so far. That's a lot of territory to take. So I think that that kind of land bridge is a likely scenario. Now, I do just wanna make sure that we recognize, Ukrainians are not only saying that they won't accept Russia taking more territory, people that I know from Crimea are saying, oh no, we're taking Crimea back. We're not giving, not only we're not giving up territory, but we're taking the territory that Russia took from us in 2014 and we're gonna take it back. So that's just another reason to keep in mind that this is not, even if Russia claims a victory by May 9th, that might not actually be the end of this thing because Ukrainians are really seeing that they're the ones who are negotiating for their future right now and their stakes for victory are different than Russia's stakes for victory. This isn't exactly a follow-up question, but something you mentioned, Emily, that really stuck with me. You said that Putin is truly afraid of a true democracy in Ukraine. And from everything that we hear about Russia, what we just heard from Chris, why it seems like there is such a lack of real democracy in Russia why is he careful of that in Ukraine? Well, I think it's maybe a little bit less about Russia than about some of the other former Soviet republics that don't yet have strong functioning democracies. The Baltic States are really the only former Soviet countries that are in the European Union, they're in NATO. They have not just strong but internationally recognized democracies. Ukraine is on the path, Georgia's on the path, but a lot of the other countries, especially in Central Asia, aren't close to that, but they are kind of more equivalent in population size to Ukraine than they are to Russia. And so those countries turning away from the Russian model, away from authoritarian politics, that's something that would really influence Russia's influence in the region. And I mean, I do think that Putin is at this point fearful of every threat to his power. So he probably is fearful of any kind of potential uprising within Russia, but I'm sure Chris can tell us that that's not especially likely. Yeah, but I think there is, there's like a psychological issue too, right? Not unlike the Soviet period when it became increasingly clear the people in the Soviet Union that people even in the Eastern Bloc were living better than they were, that they had more access to a few more rights, a few more consumer goods. And I think that Russia making this argument that Ukraine, we are brothers, we are one nation, if Ukraine is a functioning democracy that has more liberal policies, that has more freedoms, that has more access to the West, that is eventually going to reflect badly on an increasingly authoritarian Russian regime. Now I don't think that means the Russians are necessarily gonna rise up in the street, but I do think that Putin sees that as being problematic for people to, and it's a lot harder to hide in a world that has social media, in a world that has much freer communication. There's some questions from the audience. The first question, why is Patrick Kryol not spoken out against Putin's aggression and war crimes? How vulnerable is he to Putin's assassins since Putin claims to be a strong supporter for the Russian Orthodox Church? And is the desire for a mythical one true Orthodox Church self-serving? Lots of questions in there. Yeah, so I don't think that Kyrgyzl who is basically the Russian equivalent of the Pope, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, I don't think he's worried about assassination. I think he's very much on team Putin. I think that it benefits the church terrifically to be closely aligned with the Russian state. It's a very rich institution. They benefit from a lot of sort of inter-governmental affairs. And Putin, one of the things, some people argue that the difference between the Cold War period and now is that the ideology isn't there anymore, there's not sort of the ideological difference necessarily between the West and Russia. But if there is an ideology in Russia, it's this idea of conservative Christian family values. And we've seen that in how Putin has really come down harshly against LGBTQ rights and other things that he sees as sort of decadent Western traditions that are being increasingly embraced by the West. And that benefits Kirill, who is interested in who is very much behind this idea of the Christian, rather, these Eastern values, these Slavic values, so that benefits him as well. And that's why he hasn't spoken out. I'm not sure, Emily, if it's worth talking about the fissure between the Ukrainian and the Russian church in this regard. Yeah, and this is something that is, it happened, what, in 2016 was Thomas? So in 2016, the Patriarch Bartholomew of Constantinople, who's the leader of the overall Orthodox Church overall. I'm definitely not a religion expert, so please excuse me for using the incorrect term. I put you on the spot. It's one of those, I spent a really long time getting my churches right, because this is an important question. So Patriarch Bartholomew recognized the independence of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, which was claiming that it was separate from the Moscow Orthodox Church. And that, so that was under the previous president, but that was a very significant shift. The Ukrainian Orthodox Church had always been allied with the Russian Orthodox Church, but wanted its head to be in Constantinople and not in Moscow. And so there has been this diminished power of the Russian Orthodox Church since Thomas. And while that isn't exactly linked to what we have seen in the past six weeks, I think that's part of that shift in Putin's perspective. Like I mentioned, he used to recognize Ukrainian sovereignty and he started not to. And part of that is because these huge institutions, I mean, the Russian Orthodox Church has a very strong influence in Russian society, just in terms of it being really the dominant religion. And same with Ukraine, the Ukrainian Orthodox Church is, it's a very significant actor in Ukrainian internal, kind of not only cultural norms, but just sort of the role that that recognition played was really significant. So I wouldn't understate the importance of that, even if it isn't exactly a kind of process that we can identify. Another question about religion. I know that I was so surprised to learn that Zelensky was a Jew. And to me, it made Ukraine seem like a much more liberal place. And if you could just touch on the place of Jews in Ukraine and how potentially Zelensky's Jewish background has impacted Russia, the way that Russia is treating Ukraine right now. Yeah, great, great question. Because this is all wrapped up in these ethnic identities. I mean, Russia and Ukraine, both very diverse places. We've both mentioned Orthodoxy, but Ukraine I can speak more specifically to has a very diverse population. The Crimean-Tatar indigenous population from Crimea is largely Muslim, although they also have some Jewish, people of Jewish faith as well. So Zelensky in interviews in the past has identified as kind of an average Soviet Jewish family. So not an especially strongly practicing Jewish family, but one that does identify as Jewish. If you look at Ukraine's history, it has had a fraught relationship with Jews. And probably we don't have time to quite go into that much detail there. But the thing that's I think more important is precisely Zelensky's rise to power, which does come with his popularity from his TV show, which is how he was a TV comedian with a hugely popular TV show that you can watch on Netflix if you would like to. It's called Servants of the People. But so he really used that popularity to become president, but it does indicate there has been a shift toward more liberal values in Ukraine. Ukraine has a better record than Russia in terms of things like LGBT rights, in terms of things like protecting ethnic non-discrimination, for example, it's not great, right? Like it's not a country that's known as a melting pot like the U.S. And we have our own problems, even though that's our whole self-identity, right? But Ukraine is really making moves to work toward that. And Zelensky, I think it's kind of a representative of that shift toward these more progressive, more forward-looking values that previous presidents did not have. And that's why the whole question of denazification is such a weird irony because Ukraine is not run by Nazis because they wouldn't support any of those moves. So that's, again, just to go back to these sort of contradictions in Putin's justifications. Thank you. Fascinating, the whole thing's fascinating. Another question from the audience. Suppose the Ukrainians expel all Russian forces from the territory that was Ukraine in 2014, i.e. out of both Crimea and the Donbas, is the war over then? What happens? So I think that's obviously a very complicated question. I think that Emily's not wrong that Putin has to be able to spin this for a win in some way. And I think that if things look increasingly like the Ukrainians have the upper hand, even in this sort of renewed fighting in the East and the South, I feel like at that point, Putin begins to up the stakes. And I think that's when you begin to worry more about the use of chemical weapons or even the use of limited nuclear weapons. And I think that an interesting anecdote that one of my colleagues at work mentioned was she said that there was an American general who was speaking to a Russian scientist who he developed rockets. And the Russian scientist said to him, OK, you're in the military. How often do you think about your nuclear weapons? And the American said, never. We basically operate like we don't have them. And he said to the rocket engineer, how often do you think about your nuclear weapons? And he said, every day. So there's a real difference in the way that America and Russia conceive of our nuclear arsenal or for the Russians, it is very much a present part of their potential strategy. And so what I worry about is if the war continues and if things go badly, even more badly for Russia. And certainly my hope is that Ukraine is free and peaceful again, that Putin is not going to go quietly. It's my fear. I think Chris, you sort of did address this issue, but another question from the audience. I have heard from a Russian professor and a friend that most Russians know what Putin is doing in Ukraine, but are too afraid to say or do anything but appear supportive of Putin. What is your perception of the level of Russian knowledge of the war? And I think you did sort of address that. But it is a really interesting topic, particularly as we think of what does democracy mean and how does democracy play into this conflict? Yeah. So I mean, you can't trust opinion polls. Obviously people are not comfortable in responding truthfully to polls. And so polling data is more or less useless. But I think that you can't assume that Putin doesn't have popular support. He definitely does have popular support. He definitely has people who want to stick their head in the sand and don't want to acknowledge this is happening. So I think it really runs the gamut. We had a lecture at the Davis Center a week ago by a very high-profile Russian historian who is still living in Russia. And his impression, and again, it's sort of a Western Russian impression, because he lives in one of the Western cities, was that people know what's happening. And they either don't feel comfortable speaking out. Some of them are forced to speak out. There was a letter that came out from Russian rectors. Russian rectors are basically the deans of Russian colleges. And they're basically state employees. They're not individual, independent university employees. And a lot of them came out and signed a statement supporting the war. And his argument was, they don't necessarily have the free will, because if they want to keep their job and if they want to stay safe, they have to come out. So I don't think we have a great sense of where the dividing line is between people who truly believe that this is right, people who have a true understanding of what's happening. But we also hear these anecdotes of people who there's Ukrainians who have Russian family, have family members in Russia and vice versa. And there was a heartbreaking story I just read about in the paper where a young man, his father lived in Russia. He lived in Ukraine. And the war had been going on for a week. And his father hadn't called him to check on him. And when he called his father and said, what give? So why haven't you called me? His father said, what are you talking about? That's not really happening. That war is, you're making this all up. And so his own father didn't believe him. But I think for those people who have family in QAnon or who are on the sort of the liberal and conservative divide in the US, there's different conceptions of reality. But I think it's really hard to say one way or the other sort of what the percentage breakdown is of who believes what. Right, right. I to kind of wrap up, we have heard, of course, from you as well as from following the news, the horrific death toll, the disruption of lives in terms of refugees, people leaving both Russia and Ukraine, the huge numbers of both Ukrainian casualties and casualties of Russian soldiers. What would be a rebuilding? How will either of these countries kind of start to come out of this? Let's, we of course, are praying for a peaceful outcome when it does end, what's going to happen to Ukraine? How does Ukraine rebuild? Well, I think to start, it's going to take rather a lot of investment from the countries that have responded most strongly to Russia as well as those financial institutions. Chris mentioned the sheer destruction of infrastructure. Ukraine had put a lot of money in the past few years into revamping its roads and really putting a lot of money into modernizing some of its transportation systems. All of that has been destroyed. Ukrainian educational systems are being absolutely destroyed right now. So to some extent, it's also about meeting Ukrainians kind of where they are now and what they're asking for. And I do mean military aid that Chris talked about, but I also mean, you know, a lot of universities right now are offering fellowship programs to bring people temporarily to the US, that sort of thing. But the Kiev School of Economics, which you mentioned, Chris, is an institution that's advocating for a lot of non-residential fellowships as well. There's a lot of people who are staying in Ukraine right now and they do not want to leave. So we also have to think about the future of rebuilding Ukraine as helping people want to stay in Ukraine so that they can rebuild. One of my contacts at Kiev School of Economics is really fearful of a brain drain because of this, that all this money, the only money to support Ukrainian academics is gonna be external and they're gonna have to leave where he is really an advocate of making sure that people have reason to stay. Now I say that, but also knowing that almost everybody, I know from Ukraine has stayed in Ukraine, they wanna stay, they don't wanna go anywhere, they wanna help, people are returning to Kiev already. They're really looking at how they can go back to some semblance of a normal life to help kind of move forward. And that's something where, while we do have to be kind of conscious of how we're helping in terms of making sure people have resources that are available, the will to rebuild I think is gonna be really, really strong. So finding ways to support that is gonna be for Ukraine, I think the best bet. Yeah, we're almost out of time here. So I just wanted to ask one last question. Here we are, a room full of people from Eastern Massachusetts. What do you think is the most helpful thing that people here can do today to support Ukrainians? I think one thing they can continue to do, and they're doing a great job of it tonight, is to keep thinking about what's happening. We live in a very short attention span world. We saw that Will Smith hitting Chris Rock knocked Ukraine off the front page of a lot of newspapers. And the people of Ukraine are living with this every day and are going to continue to live with it for years to come. This is not a problem that's gonna be fixed overnight. And as somebody who has long loved Russia, the people of Russia are also gonna be dealing with the consequences of this for a very long time. So I think that one thing they can do is remain invested as being global citizens and in knowing what's going on. And I think Emily may have some suggestions too for specific actions that people can take. Yes, I'm going to put, and totally absolutely agree 100% Chris, this is really essential to keep paying attention. I'm gonna put in the chat the Ukrainian Research Institute's website. In particular, I ask people to do a couple of things. First of all, make sure that you're looking at good information and sharing good information. Tonight is an example of great information. So thank you for doing that already. We have places listed on our website that will point you to some of that good information. The information war is a real front of this war. So anything you can do, that's your part that you can really easily do from Massachusetts. If you are in a position to donate, there are tons of absolutely fantastic organizations to donate to. Those are also listed on our website. You can access humanitarian organizations in Ukraine and Poland. You can donate directly to the Ukrainian military if you want to, all kinds of things. Write to your representatives, ask them for more military aid to Ukraine. That's something I've been doing regularly for the past few weeks, and that's something that really is helpful. And then if you see a rally that's going on in support of Ukraine, go to it. That's something that I've heard from friends in Ukraine specifically saying, thank you for going. It means so much to me that people are out in the streets. They're thinking of us. It just, it really helps people keep going. And those I think are a bunch of really easy, not very time consuming things that all of us can do just to make sure that Ukraine remains on all of our minds. So that's, please check out the website. We've got a lot of resources on there and hopefully those will help you. I should say even walking around my own neighborhood seeing Ukrainian flags here in Arlington has been really, really heartwarming. And it does cause you to stop and think and reflect and sort of put yourself back in that space to realize what's happening. I'll also go ahead and put the Davis Center website in the chat. We do a lot of events, a lot of online events. We have a lot of event recordings and we have a lot of publishing that happens directly on our website. So if you're interested in knowing more about what's happening in the region, you can certainly take a look there. Thank you so much. I want to thank you both so much for coming. I want to thank you, Emily, for saying such great things about finding the real information as a librarian. Of course, that really warms my heart. That matters so much to us. And I did want to share the story that this event came about because my library staff did create a guide to understanding the situation and you create the war in Ukraine. And Chris saw it on Twitter and said, hey, we'd love to come and speak to your library. So it's fantastic the way that that real information really added us to this fantastic event. I want to thank everyone so much for coming out tonight. Of course, I want to give special thanks to both Chris and Emily for sharing their expertise and such fantastic information. I want to thank our partner libraries for joining us tonight. And again, most special thanks to the Arlington Libraries Foundation for supporting this and so many other wonderful conversations. This event has been recorded and the recorded will be available on our website in a couple of days. And again, thank you so much for coming and we will see you there. We have a ton of information in the chat and mostly people saying thank you so much for coming tonight. So thanks to all and please do stop by your library and we will see you all later. Bye. Good night. Thanks everyone. Thank you.